Help on KDE PIM data loss bugs
Posted on: March 8, 2012
- In: KDE | openSUSE
- 6 Comments
There are annoying bugs and there are data loss bugs. The problem with the latter is that if people notice them it’s already too late. So I would like to collect all the data loss bugs for KDE PIM in order to attract testers and help debugging them, i.e. find a way for developers to re-produce them reliably.
Also, knowing what can cause data loss enables users to work around these scenarios and hence saves a lot of anger towards the devs.
So please point me to data loss bugs and test those listed already. If bugs are re-producible and confirmed by several users using different distros they are more likely to get fixed. Please do not add another “me too” to bug reports which already have a confirmation for your distro! Please do only test with current packages, i.e. akonadi 1.7.1 and KDE PIM 4.8.1.
Bug 293768
Symptoms: body and attachments are lost.
How to reproduce: Disconnect network while akonadi is downloading an email to move it to a local folder.
- Send a very large (long time to download is needed) email to your online imap account.
- Click on the email to make kmail display the “loading screen” in the preview pane.
- Press DEL to move the email to the local trash.
- While akonadi/kmail are still downloading, disconnect the network, e.g. open the networkmanagement plasmoid and untick the “enable network” checkbox.
- The email you deleted was moved to the trash as soon as the network got disconnected, even though downloading was not finished. Hence the email in the trash lost its body and attachments.
Bug 295484
Symptoms: Body and attachments lost when piping through external application and adding headers.
How to reproduce: Filter incoming emails through an external app which adds headers.
- Create spam filtering rules for spamassasin (or bogofilter) via kmail’s wizard.
- Make sure they are applied to your imap’s inbox.
- If possible open your imap account in a webmail interface.
- Wait for new email to arrive and check with the webmail interface how the email is replaced. Do not read it, since the bug is not re-producible with read email or by applying filters manually.
- After akonadi/kmail has filtered the email and added the anti-spam tool’s header, open it in both kmail and the webmail interface. Both show that the body and attachments are gone.
- For bogofilter you have to train it first (marking emails as spam and ham) in order for it to actually add any headers, i.e. trigger the bug.
Bug 286043
Symptoms: Headers as well as body and attachments are lost.
How to re-produce: This bug was not tested yet with recent packages and does not state a way to re-produce, so if you know how, please add it.
Bug 281704
Symptoms: Emails lost if KDE PIM is closed while copying from imap to imap.
How to reproduce: Copy/move an imap folder and close kmail while the transaction is still in progress.
IMO this could be a duplicate of bug 293768.
6 Responses to "Help on KDE PIM data loss bugs"
March 8, 2012 at 15:37
I’ve also noticed data loss while moving between two local mailboxes
March 8, 2012 at 18:58
Bug 291171 is not a real data loss bug, but kmail cannot format the content anymore, so you get unformated source (attachments in plain base64 coded ascii).
March 8, 2012 at 20:48
Ok, I should have checked the status of the bug.. It’s fixed already 🙂
April 14, 2012 at 14:25
it isnt fixed.
Kmail looses the mail body on and on.
My imap mailbox works toghether with evolution without problems.
when i open the same mail then in kmail (after I opened it in Evolution) I get back a second empty mail with the identical header in the imap mailbox.
If I open the mail in kmail or kontact first, the mail gets replaced empty.
It´s a shame that this Bug returns always again.
I think i´ll switch to the gnome environment, the kmail/ kontact stuff is way to risky to have it in a producing system.
My KDE week 
March 8, 2012 at 14:53
I noticed an issue with LionMail Plasmoid that sometimes when I mark a message as read from the plasmoid (because it does not automatically mark them as read when I open them from the plasmoid?), the E-Mail is lost (and just displayes “Unknown” as subject, time, and so)
Oh, and could you point me to a simple manual to actually backup my E-Mail? I still couldn’t figure out where Akonadi actually stores them and how to reliably backup them… Thanks! 🙂
March 8, 2012 at 15:28
I never used Lion Mail. Did you file a bug and watched what happened in akonadiconsole while you mark the email as read and it gets lost?
Regarding the back-up, akonadi does not keep any of your email, it is just a cache between your email folders and applications that want to access that data. Your email still resides in the mail folders you used with kmail1 or which you created when adding resources. So open systemsettings > personal information and check the paths of the resources. They point to the folders you have to back-up.
There is only one thing one has to know: a local folder resource will point to e.g. ~/.local/share/local-mail, yet that folder does not actually contain the data. The data is stored in ~/.local/share/.local-mail.directory. See bug 285895.